February 23, 2017

The next Autodesk Answer Day will be held on March 8, 2017, and will focus on AEC Products. The English-language event will run from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm US Pacific Time and cover BIM 360, Civil 3D, InfraWorks 360 and Revit. The German-language event will run from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm Central Europe Time and cover AutoCAD Produktfamilie - Deutsch (AutoCAD and Civil 3D) and Revit - Deutsch.

February 17, 2017

Here is an additional Wall Cleanup tip, for a condition that comes up just infrequently enough that I forget to check for this up front. If you have a "base" drawing file (Construct or Element for those of you using Project Navigator and the Drawing Management system) in which the Walls all clean up just fine and also have a "host" drawing file into which that base drawing is externally referenced, in which all (or nearly all) of the Walls from that external reference are showing cleanup errors, the first thing to check is whether or not you have two or more instances of the external reference, all on top of each other. If the Wall Cleanup Group(s) assigned to the Walls in the base drawing allow for cleanup between host and xref drawings (check the Design Rules tab of the Wall Cleanup Group Definition), then the Walls will all be trying to cleanup with the "same" Wall in the other instance(s), generating the cleanup errors. Remove all but one instance of the externally referenced file to eliminate the duplicates and you will likely see your cleanup problems go away.

February 15, 2017

I ran into a case of this today, and as I checked a number of other things that were not the cause of the problem before I found this Autodesk® Knowledge Network article, I thought I would document it here so I can find it faster in the future.

The problem was that the linked model did not have any Rooms in the equivalent phase that was set in the host file Views in which the Room Tags were to be placed. Since Rooms are phase-specific, they need to be recreated for each phase.

In this particular case, there were variations in the names that were given to the phases. To verify how the phases for a particular linked file are mapped (and make any necessary adjustments):

In the host file, select the linked model.

On the Properties palette, select the Edit Type button.

In the Type Properties dialog, under the Other category, select the Edit button to the right of the Phase Mapping parameter.

In the Phases dialog, you can assign the appropriate phase from the linked file to each phase in the host file. Revit will usually match up phases with the same name. (I am not sure what happens if the same names are used, but the phases are in a different order. That is such bad practice that I do not even want to test it.) Selecting in the Phase from linked file column next to a given host Phase will activate a drop-down list, which can be used to select from the phases defined in the linked file.

The phases shown in the image above are just the default Existing and New Construction phases, and are the same in both sample files. On a real project, particularly one with multiple phases, there are "opportunities" for different disciplines to use different names and it may not be readily apparent how the phases map without checking.

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About Me

I am an architect employed by EwingCole in its Philadelphia office, currently serving as the Design Technology Manager. In addition to using ADT/ACA and Revit on the job, I serve as a moderator in the AUGI Forums and formerly served as a facilitator for the Autodesk ADT/ACA Discussion Groups.